My wife’s mom, her husband, and his mother are in Tamura, about 40 km from the disaster-struck Fukushima Daiichi power plant, the yellow pin on the map. The yellow circle shows the 20-km evacuation zone; the larger circle indicates the 30-km zone in which people are advised to stay indoors and keep windows closed. Their house is about half way between the Daiichi and Daini power plants. (The latter, indicated by the pink pin, also had problems earlier but the situation there now seems to be under control.) The house is near the town of Tomioka, whose train station, which has often served as our starting point for trips around Japan, has been completely washed away by the tsunami.

My wife’s mom, her husband, and his mother are in Tamura, about 40 km from the disaster-struck Fukushima Daiichi power plant, the yellow pin on the map. The yellow circle shows the 20-km evacuation zone; the larger circle indicates the 30-km zone in which people are advised to stay indoors and keep windows closed. Their house is about half way between the Daiichi and Daini power plants. (The latter, indicated by the pink pin, also had problems earlier but the situation there now seems to be under control.) The house is near the town of Tomioka, whose train station, which has often served as our starting point for trips around Japan, has been completely washed away by the tsunami.

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I am writing this text (Mar 12) to give you some peace of mind regarding some of the troubles in Japan, that is the safety of Japan’s nuclear reactors. Up front, the situation is serious, but under control. And this text is long! But you will know more about nuclear power plants after reading it than all journalists on this planet put together.

There was and will *not* be any significant release of radioactivity.

By “significant” I mean a level of radiation of more than what you would receive on – say – a long distance flight, or drinking a glass of beer that comes from certain areas with high levels of natural background radiation.

Follow the YokosoNews (in English), NHK World TV (also in English), and NHK GTV (in Japanese) Ustream channels on a single page. (Cacophony of audio? Use the mute button, Luke!)

TBS TV live on Ustream.

NHK live on Ustream.

I will admit that I am

miso soup ambivalent. The rest of the world though, apparently loves the stuff and my fiancé begged me to figure out how to make it. Challenge accepted.

Thankfully I did not have to look far to find a recipe in JustBento’s . A quick reading revealed that miso soup, like boba, is one of those dishes that are so easy you will kick yourself for paying for them. Even better you can assemble the ingredients ahead of time and bring them along for what I think of as a soup grenade.

Recipe for making miso soup, not quite from scratch, follows.

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